Sheesh Mahal

The Sheesh Mahal in the London Road has long been one of the best for food Indians in Twickenham. Last Wednesday evening was no different. What was also the same was the delivery of service? Hardly a welcome when we walked into a quarter full restaurant.

After being seated at an unmade table poppadoms came quickly and were excellent. Luckily they were because we waited an age to place our order and then only after prompting the waiter. The restaurant was still mostly empty.

The Sheesh has recently adopted a BYO (bring your own) policy for alcohol.  So starting the evening means buying the drink of your choice in a local shop or bring from home. This gives greater choice and reflects very positively when the bill arrives.

The food, once ordered came in a reasonable time and everything came together. The food we all thought was excellent.  A new dish to us was that of Mushroom Masala which was outstanding.

A last positive note was that if we paid cash there was a 10% discount, something to do with card payment machine.

Taking the whole experience the Sheesh scored 4 out of 5 stars completely due to the quality of the food.

PC

https://sheesh-mahal.co.uk

Sheesh Mahal Restaurant

19-21 Twickenham Road

Twickenham

TW1 3SX

020 8892 3303
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Tsaretta Spice

Tsaretta Review

Time and tide waits for no man. There is a lot of useful information on the internet, but also a lot which is out of date. We realised this blog rather falls into the latter category, so resolved to bring it more up to date.

As a first step we went along to the (fairly) new Indian restaurant at the east end of Church Street, Tsaretta Spice. This claims to offer 'a new and vibrant dining experience'. In other words, it is all a bit up-market, at least by Twickenham standards.

This restaurant offers Indian tapas, but only at lunchtime. We went along on a dull midweek evening in January, and were surprised at how busy it was. It was fortunate that we had made a prior reservation. The table that had been saved for us was downstairs, where a large group was already seated. It is great if you are part of a large boisterous group having fun, but not so great if you have to share a dining room with such a group. Fortunately the waiting staff immediately recognised this, and re-seated us in the upstairs room: much quieter.

The décor in the dining rooms was bright and modern, the chairs were comfortable, and the tables just about big enough: always a problem in Indian restaurants where there never seems to be sufficient room for all the dishes and glasses. There was background music playing, not traditional Indian, but conventional middle-of-the-road. This however had to compete with the bellringers at nearby St Mary's, who were practising their peals.

Our waitress, a lady from Italy, was friendly and helpful. The menu is more varied than at most Indian restaurants, and includes dishes of goat, venison and beef. We found the quality of the dishes to be high, although one of our group thought they were rather salty. The meat in the beef pepper fry was tender and full of flavour, and the dish was not too spicy, despite having two chili peppers printed against it on the menu. The portions of rice were generous, and the papadoms and nan bread were fresh and tasty. The vegetable side dishes were also of high quality. There is an extensive wine list, but we stuck to beer: draft Cobra at £5.95 a pint. Our main critcism was that the dishes were brought to the table in a number of deliveries, and there was quite a while between the first and the last. We thought back nostalgically to the late Taste of Mogul, where they used to bring up everything you had ordered on a trolley, in one fell swoop.

In all, an enjoyable dining experience, but as is to be expected from a restaurant advertising itself as top end, a somewhat expensive one, at least in comparison with the other Indian restaurants nearby. After discussion, we decided to award the Tsaretta Spice four stars out of five.

RW

www.tsarettaspice.com

55 Church Street,

Twickenham

TW1 3NR

02088921096

New reviews will be appearing soon! Watch this space.......

Green Spice

Green Spice

 We visited this, our last destination on our quest to review all Twickenham’s Indian restaurants, on a Wednesday evening. It happened that Wednesday night was the weekly special deal - a starter, a main, side dish and rice and bread for £9.95. We decided to give it a go and forego our normal pappadoms and main course for the special. The popularity of the special was evident when we arrived at the restaurant - there were many people there and as we had passed a number of empty Indian restaurants on our way there, it was obviously quite a draw.

 We were ushered into a back room because of the lack of room in the main body of the restaurant. Beer was bottled Cobra or Kingfisher at £4.95 for a 660ml a bottle. Full access to the menu was allowed save that king prawn dishes attracted a premium of £3. Our starters comprised prawn puri, sheek kebab, keema kebab,chicken puri - all of which were pretty good. Main courses were some time in coming, presumably because of the crush and again they were of a reasonable standard: chicken jalfrezi, king prawn patia, chicken dansak, chicken rezalla (a strange dish of chicken with minced meat and in my experience heavily laced with black pepper) and chicken lahore (with spinach).These were accompanied by cauliflower bhaji, niramish, bindi bhaji, dall and potatoes with spinach; various sorts of rice and the full range of breads - naan, roti and stuffed paratha - to supplement the dishes. Overall, quality was reasonable but the chicken dansak was distinctly odd and aside from the whole green chillies masquerading as green beans in the niramish we were impressed with the value for money of this offer.

 When the bill arrived we found that we had spent as much on beer as we had on food - 2 bottles each. The food was ample and probably too much in all honesty, so we couldn’t complain about the quality or quantity at the price. To top it off we were given brandies, After 8s and oranges on the house. If the service was slow it was because of the numbers of people there but the quite spacious separate room was nice as I find some Indian restaurants to be too cramped.

 Our scores overall were as follows:

 Price:          7.9

Service:      6.8

 Quality:       7.2

 Ambiance:  5.8

 Total:          27.7

27th March 2013

http://www.thegreenspice.co/

Moiduls Rawalpindi

Moiduls Rawalpindi

This was the first time that the reviewers had re-visited a restaurant which was subject to an earlier review. One reason related to the fact that the review was based on the views of  only two of us following a lunchtime visit and we felt that notwithstanding the good impression and the resulting positive review, it was necessary to try it out again in the evening. A secondary issue was that we could not agree on which of the two, as yet, un-reviewed restaurants should be tackled next – we all viewed that prospect with unrestrained horror!!

Moiduls was kitted out with posters on the walls announcing the recent award , quoting: “West London’s ‘curry master’ Moidul Hussain scooped Best South Asian Restaurant (London suburbs) at the prestigious 2012 Asian Curry Awards held last month.  His eponymous restaurant, Moidul’s in Teddington, took the prized top award, while the Twickenham branch, Moidul’s Rawalpindi, was highly commended.”  Our overall impression was that the restaurant lived up to this accolade. There was a number of other diners who were there before us – attesting the relative popularity of the restaurant on a cold night in the depths of January. This is in stark contrast to the sorry sight of many of our Indian restaurants in mid-week in a Twickenham under pressure from the recession. This meant that our food took longer than in many other establishments, which to us means that it is cooked freshly and is in line with our earlier lunchtime visit.

 

Our poppadams arrived, accompanied by a variety of pickles in addition to the usual onion chutney and the various other coconut, tamarind and yoghourt concoctions – an interesting and impressive array of condiments.

Our order was both adventurous and focused on firm favourites: lamb chop biriany (!) certainly new to us; Haas Tikka, described on the menu as ‘marinated duck fillets lightly spiced and cooked in the clay oven’,  making a pleasant change from the usual chicken; king prawn dansak and chicken dansak ; balti chicken tikka jalfrezi. Vegetable accompaniments were spinach, cauliflower bhaji, tarka dall, bindi and brinjal mixed, again new to us, kobi aloo. Interestingly they provided pilaw rice with the dansak dishes and were happy to replace the rice with roti for one of us. Overall, the quality of food was first rate and was surely freshly cooked. No complaints here on portions and quality.

Beer is our staple when eating curry and they have three types of Indian beers – Bangla (again new to us) draught Kingfisher and Cobra. The bottled beers were expensive in our view at £4.95 but the draught at £3.95 is not unreasonable. Overall, prices we thought were toppish but the service and ambience, including the ethnic music were good and far above the average quality. The waiters worked hard and were pleasant and deserved their tip despite the overall level prices.

Our scoring was as follows:

Price:              7

Service:          7.75

Quality:          8.5

Ambience:     7.5

Total:              30.75

23rd January 2013

Sheesh Mahal

Sheesh Mahal

The reputation of the Sheesh had me believe that the food would be very good but the service efficient and rather uncaring. The second was confirmed when we were greeted not with a warm “Good evening” but a stern “Have you booked?” this may have been efficient but was easy to interpret as “You are going to be lucky if you eat in here”. Having said this the manager who took our order was as friendly and helpful as was possible to be.

The papadums came quickly, were crisp, and accompanied with tasty pickles.  The menu was standard, including all the dishes one would expect. If the papadums came quickly, the food was amazingly fast to arrive. Being fast did not detract from the quality. Everyone’s dishes were fresh and well prepared, the portions did not disappoint. Silence descended as we ate a very nice meal and we all agreed that the Sheesh is one of the best Indians in Twickenham. The only minor comments were that the Madras was surprisingly mild and the Jalfrezi particularly lively.

The décor is unusual for an Indian restaurant outside of London: with an unbroken polished wood theme throughout makes it tasteful but perhaps cold. A sort of Scandinavian, Cubic creation.  Without doubt, this was meal that we all enjoyed.  If you are prepared to order leisurely and eat slowly, you will gain the most from the experience.

We scored the Sheesh Mahal out of 10 as follows:

Price:               7

Service:           7

Quality:           8

Ambiance:       7

Total:               29

8^th Nov 2012

http://www.sheesh-mahal.co.uk

Naz Balti

Naz Balti Review

It was with heavy hearts that we approached the Naz restaurant to undertake our last review in Church Street. Given the poor showing of the other two restaurants in our earlier reviews, we were not hopeful that this would be a good dining experience.

However, our pessimism started to lift with the arrival of the poppadoms, appropriately crisp and with a good selection of pickles, and the price of the beer – Kingfisher at £3.75 pint and Cobra in large bottles at £4.35 per bottle, helped to relieve our gloom. It was a Wednesday night and with a special offer on thali – two of us had the non-vegetarian and a third the vegetarian thali. The other two in our party plumped for their normal selections: chicken Jalfrezi and chicken dansak, together with side vegetables – sag aloo and bindi. The thalis, both vegetarian and meat versions were excellent and good value for money at £8.95.There were six separate pots of vegetable or meat dishes, together with naan and rice. They appeared to be freshly prepared and were of good quality and variety. The dansak and jalfrezi dishes were good but both under-strength in terms of spiciness. The vegetable dishes were ample and better than average.

Overall, we found that despite our misgivings the Naz warranted its positioning at fourth in our reckoning of the ten Twickenham (one overseas!) curry houses we have reviewed to date. It’s a shame that its external appearance and internal décor is little different from that of its neighbour the Dehli Durbar. Notwithstanding this, it is by far the best curry house in the highly popular Church Street dining destination.

We scored the Naz Balti as follows:

Price:                          7.5

Service:                      6.9

Quality:                       7.5

Ambiance:                  6.5

Total:                          28.4

10th October 2012

http://www.nazbalti.com/